Lately Juice’s car has been making an alarming knocking noise when we go over any kind of tiny bump. Like, seriously alarming. Something hits right below your feet. It’s not supposed to do that. So. We’re off to take it to the shop to (hopefully) get it fixed for (hopefully!) a decent price. My thought is that a bolt came loose and something important is just hanging free.

This morning we packed everyone into the car with the intention of having lunch at Ikea. Yum! It’s something we try to do every time Flower is in town. We love Ikea.

So we’re all set to go and I turn on the car. Well, I try to anyway. Nothing was happening. Just a clicking noise. So I hopped out and asked Juice to come on out and jump the car. He hooks up the cables and suddenly, they begin to smoke. And then the plastic begins to melt. We were jumping around trying to figure out how to get them off the car since they were much to hot to touch. We ended up using Pirate’s hat as a hot pad. It was the first thing I could find. And it now has red plastic melted to it. Oh well.

After much Internet searching and a question posed to a friend, we decided the battery WAS the culprit. Juice tried to put the battery from his car into mine but it didn’t fit. In taking out the battery, he realized that he probably put the jumper cables on the wrong terminals and that’s what caused them to smoke.

Once he put them on the right terminals the car started right up. Well, we decided that we really can’t be driving around with a super bad battery so we went off to the store to get one.

I know! Let’s go on an impromptu date to the auto shop! We went to Sears because they were close and put a battery in Juice’s car when the boys were small. We drove up and no one came to see what we needed. I didn’t want to turn the car off for fear the battery would die and we would be stuck in their bay. Well we waited, and waited. And waited. Almost half an hour later we had someone come to us and ask if we needed to be rung up. Uh, excuse me? Juice told him we wanted to be helped, not checked out. He waved it aside and said, “Well then do you want to be signed in then?” He was NOT nice with it either.

Once we told him we needed a battery, he said, “Oh, that will be at least 2 hours.” For a battery! We said no thank you and tried to back up. He stopped us and told us he needed to put us into the system. I very firmly told him no and we drove away.

And right to Jiffy Lube. Where we were greeted upon driving up. And 35 minutes later, we had a new battery and an oil change. Awesome! I love Jiffy Lube.